Re: Portable database ... ?

Hi Tom,

thanks a lot for your reply!

  > In principle that could work ...

  > ... but you need to use a real file system ;-). [...]  So the
  > question becomes whether your Linux system is able to access an
  > NTFS partition.

I see ... I understand people have been trying to reverse-engineer
NTFS for more than a decade now, and yet no solution is really mature
(I am inferring this from the fact that it is not a standard option
with any Linux distro). So I've given up on that. That is, the support
I do have is read access and write access limited to changing the
contents of files without changing their length or name (imagine that
- but I even have one real application for this peculiar write
feature!). (This is what the standard kernel offers.)

But for real work, I have resigned myself to VFAT (which isn't so much
of a problem really, if you have a single-user machine).

  > You might have better luck with a remotely mounted data directory
  > (across NFS or some such).  There are reliability gotchas with
  > that sort of setup, but frankly if you're doing something like
  > this I doubt that 100% bullet proofness is achievable anyway.

I would actually tend to think that if I had a network, the better
solution may be to have the database running on the remote machine -
but anyway, my environment is simply a double-boot machine.

I seem to have found a real solution in the meantime. I should
probably have mentioned this, but mine would be a single-user
database, with rather modest requirements on complexity, and certainly
very low requirements on throughput, so PostgreSQL would be quite
high-end. I simply had not found anything simpler, and I liked the way
PostgreSQL is presented. But at last, I have found out about SQLite,
which seems to provide a type of database ideally suited to what I
need: just one machine-independent file, very simple to use - it's not
even a server application. Nevertheless, it is an SQL implementation,
if a bit restricted in some respects and unusually liberal in others.

So I probably won't pursue the PostgreSQL route further for the time
being, but it's nevertheless good to know it could work on an NTFS
partition. Who knows in what kinds of trouble I'll run next ...

Many thanks again,

Florian